BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

I’m still not sure how to feel about victory through dice roll.

may as well do this

- Meat
lend concrete roof tree
Hash: 42f668f1ced110df02c2fa1280a7f33d

- Solar Panel
lending concrete lamp soap tree
Hash: 069da9f6db1112d34127a4d4045729f8

- Solar Panel, Jacket
lending concrete lamp soap tree

(yes, the first one is probably illegal)

I think my first hash was illegal too—I absentmindedly put an “and” in my Jotting.

I still can’t do hashes for crap

Shout-out to Habanero for a fun dynasty. The mechanic of Time and Heat was a neat idea.

Yes, this one was well-run, and a good job of aligning the emperor’s responsibilities with what what they were prepared to take on.

This was definitely a fascinating dynasty to play in. Both of the metas (searching outside and hiding indoors) had their own distinct costs to them, and it was difficult to know in advance exactly which one would be the dominant one.

I might have picked the wrong one to back by hiding in the building early on for half the dynasty, but I’m at least glad that the items I suggested did play a massive role in the mid to late game even if they weren’t part of the final events.

A lot to like about this dynasty for me, as well as a lot of frustrations. I think that this will be a reference point dynasty in future for some of its mechanics, which have been demonstrated to work and which have robust rule text here.

I think it would have been a better dynasty if it had been properly solo. About midway through, in a discussion on discord, JonathanDark let slip that he had had some back channel communication with Kevan; up until that point the dynasty had been largely an individual affair. The conversation did not go well, and the outcome was that JonathanDark and Kevan were forced into a more formal alliance and the rest of the player base became motivated to look at other avenues of cooperation. Ultimately this caused the end of the dynasty, as the scam that ultimately decided matters made its way through a whisper network from lendumistus to me to Brendan.

The most frustrating thing about the dynasty was that I felt like I spent most of it pointing out the clear ways in which Kevan was accreting control in small doses through proposals, Kevan responsed with robust denials, and everyone else mostly reacted by ignoring me. I have referred to this as “rhetorical both-sides-ism” as it ended up manifesting as a collective impression that Kevan and I were as bad as each other and could thus be ignored, rather than leading to people engaging with the arguments and establishing where the actual balance of power, opportunity and interest lay. I think I managed to keep Kevan pegged in enough that he didn’t gather the kind of momentum he needed to establish a complete hold on the game but he still got a lot further than I’d've wanted. This experience led directly to this essay which attempts to put forward the idea that engaging with arguments is a core and essential part of the game, and not something that should be binned off when the comment threads get too long or heated.

Final thought: I think Brendan made the final dice roll over-generous, and that he should have given himself far more equity at the expense of Kevan and JonathanDark, who had minimal moral claim to the win on the basis being contested.

My final Jotting was “eelskin Electric Gloves, brown windsor Thermos”.

Some relief at the endgame coming down to a die roll. If we’d combed for scams and agreed to move on to a victory condition we all thought we could win, it was going to take a lot of luck and timing and chaos to come out on top of it. I still don’t really see how endgame die roll was that different to one based on early-game fool’s gold, except in how much interest there’d be in patching the scam and playing on, that late in the dynasty, but that’s probably better revisited when the smoke has cleared a bit.

Biggest gameplay regret is not taking my own general Nomic advice and adding a sanity check on a number range I wasn’t planning to use: being Feverish should really have had a drawback (probably the same as being Unconscious), and if I’d thought to propose that, it would have changed the course of the dynasty or at least tipped me off as to why people might be objecting to something that innocuous.

The Time mechanic seemed a bit harsh for the… timing, unless I was overprioritising that. I was generally trying to advance Time regularly to avoid any big surprises with someone throwing +24 hours at me and burning off some excess Time (or, worse, doing so immediately after kicking me outside or putting me into a draught). I also had an eye on making rivals waste Time by going over 60, although the couple of times I sniped Lendunistus right before they searched was blind luck rather than careful timekeeping.

Cooperation under the mantle restriction seemed okay to me, in a Diplomacy kind of way where it was less about “do this thing and I’ll give you 17.4% mantle if I win later!” “great!” and more about trade-offs in the here-and-now. My deal with JonathanDark was an extremely mild one (that they could join exactly one search if they agreed not to Respire me, and I agreed I wouldn’t Roughhouse them) that informally continued, and I had a non-aggression pact going on with SingularByte. I didn’t really mind Josh catastrophising the former into something much bigger than it was, and was gearing up to pivot that into some kind of don’t-throw-me-into-the-briar-patch limitation on player support, since it was looking like Brendan and Josh had cut some kind of deal, given how unconcerned Josh seemed about being Respired.

All the stuff about the searchable Tent being overpowered compared to the empty Cellar was genuine, I think there was some misreading on both our parts about our shelters’ relative strengths and weaknesses (eg. I’d misread Shoving as taking the victim all the way outside). It was a bit of an informational tightrope - not wanting to overexplain the relative weaknesses of the Cellar and ways to attack it, in case Josh had missed an angle that he could use, but not wanting to laugh it all off either, in case a mob sided with Josh and rose to punish me.

The Reinitialising rule seemed like a good thing for letting players back into the game after a misstep, and didn’t feel overused or unfair at any point. I’d consider having it switched on by default. Endgame Lockdown felt like it was ready to do its job but didn’t get a chance, I think we should probably give it another run next dynasty.

Finally, much as I’m a long-term fan of Mitchell and Webb (and their connected writers, I never quite got to use this one), I did find Brendan’s proposal titles a bit exhausting for making it harder to talk about or refer back to those proposals, or to remember which ones I’d voted on, or which had enacted, or which were new. I’m not sure whether that adds up to a proposer advantage or not.

(for what it’s worth I didn’t expect tent searching to pass, as it was definitely stacking the deck in my favour, but when it then got also applied to the cellar and then turned out to have a couple of fun passive cellar-exclusive buffs I was furious 😂)

To be honest, and with a bit of irony, I would have supported my name not being included in the die faces for the victory die roll if it had been proposed. I agree with Josh that I was pretty far behind in a potential win.

I, too, was surprised at how little Josh objected to me Respiring them so much. (I did the same to Darknight and SingularByte earlier in the game, of course, but Josh seemed much more active at the time when I was leaching Heat from him.) We hadn’t even exchanged messages until I think my very last Respire action, and I kept warily expecting some form of vengeance. But the action cost of Shove really was a high barrier, costing almost two days’ worth of Time in addition to Heat—am I correct in thinking that Kevan’s Shove against Josh was the only actual Grapple move in the entire dynasty?

I maintain that Heat wasn’t a fool’s resource of any kind, not with its being so closely linked to the “no dynastic actions” threshold. That perspective is informed by having had my first week of play tightly restricted by my game-opening misstep. As mentioned on Discord, that in turn was part of the motivation behind my late-game attempt to make reinitialised or unidled Heat a better deal; I spent a lot of this dynasty trying to make play more appealing or even possible for latecomers or those who got unlucky. That same impulse led to my attempts to give Lifeless players an alternative moveset, to keep Reinitialised Heat at 98.6, and to open up Alliances. (In the second case, I should have proposed “okay, if resets get you average Heat, why don’t they get you average Time too?”—that was the basic you-lose-both-ways element that struck me as unfair, and which I failed to articulate.)

All of those proposals would have benefited me, of course, but I have never enjoyed the confluence of mechanisms by which the playerbase always dwindles as a dynasty goes on, and I don’t expect I ever will. I think a ruleset which permits players to enter or re-enter late, and still meaningfully participate, is a worthy goal. I think Reinitialisation is a good mechanic to have available going forward, but the way it seemed to be framed in this round as a grudging charity offered by an austere regime bothered me—the loss of everything one might have accrued through gameplay up to the reset point, along with the limitation of one reset per dynasty, seemed like enough of a cost to pay for it.

(And hindsight is hindsight, but I didn’t think I could get to a fourth vote on the CfJ without including Kevan and JonathanDark on the die faces; even assuming I could get lendun to agree with my offer, Habanero and Darknight had no more reason to vote for my roll than they would have for a competing CfJ that offered, eg, a straight 1/4 split to each of us.)

gg. definitely enjoyed this dynasty quite a bit

had the scam not existed, I would’ve definitely been fairly boned. I worked together with SB for a bit after he reinitialised, but we got screwed by bad RNG. our plan was to get branches and then gain a whole bunch of heat, but you can see how well that turned out. cutting a deal with brendan there would’ve been basically necessary since a douse + shove would knock me out of the game instantly

also screwed up by forgetting to put the search tag on one of my searches, which ended up costing me a whole bunch of heat thanks to Kevan’s snipes (SB actually pointed out a scam there: you can just keep passing the time every time before a full hour passes and you can completely nullify the time spending)

me and Josh (who I disclosed the scam to, grr) also cut a deal somewhat at the start of the dynasty, though we ended up parting ways once we settled into the endgame. he reached out with another alliance attempt near the end but I didn’t hear back

anyways, good dynasty. congrats, JD!

I was hoping to use the Meat in my stash and my proximity to the Shed to get a late-game boost in Heat if that became part of the victory criteria. The solar panel scam obviously blew that out of the water.

My Stash at the end:

Meat
Pipe Troop Meat Bulb Committee
e3424e609d95e760e705aa77e86a1e07

Thick Jacket
Pipe Troop Meat Thick Jacket Bulb Committee
a7404e712e30e4c194ca6c9064e30499

Electric Gloves
Pipe Troop Meat Thick Jacket Electric Gloves Bulb Committee
94b71609e163d6f49b6cd0ff014c23fb

Brendan mentioning trying to “open up Alliances” is interesting next to Josh’s observation about cooperation unexpectedly kicking in mid-dynasty. Does this suggest we need to rename or reframe the “Alliances” rule, if people are thinking of it as meaning “when this is on, players will work together, and when both it and Mantle Passing are off, they won’t”?

“Alliances” is just a modifier for Mantle Passing and No Collaborations. With those both off (as they were this dynasty) all it’s doing is creating a named player variable to build on - perhaps implicitly encouraging players to amend existing assist/attack mechanics (like the Thermos, Cudgel and Huddle from the first few days of the dynasty) to a more restrictive “can only give Heat to an Ally, cannot Roughhouse or Huddle an Ally without their permission”.

Perhaps it could use a clearer rule name, something like “Public Alliances”.

(Oh, I was reading a rule title backwards there: “Mantle Limitations” being on meant that “Alliances” would have explicitly allowed a limited form of mantle passing. But the point still stands if Alliances being switched off is being read in some way as “this is a dynasty with no Alliances”.)

I have no problem with adding “Public” to the rule name, and I can’t speak for how anyone else interprets the title of the rule. But the way I interpret it is “with this rule on, alliances are overt and can be used in game mechanics; without it, alliances are unlikely to be accounted for in rules, except covertly by those already in one.”

I don’t think it’s worth overregulating that. Cooperation does always have to exist as a variable.